Tuesday, June 6, 2017

See Also:

There has never yet arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses, no who has beheld his like.
Maimonides,  Yidal, Verse 7

They tell me I've got symptoms of early stage pneumonia and I've got to go to bed.   I'm determined to live long enough to see Trump fall so I'm taking their advice.  If I didn't figure that was coming, ......... [meh].

If you want to read something really worth reading, I found a chapter of Walter Brueggemann's book The Prophetic Imagination, online, a book he identified as his signature book.

THE ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY OF MOSES

Which goes into far more detail and with what I think is a far more acute, insightful, focused and extensive discussion of the same issues discussed below.   Note that he includes what I take as an essential internal criticism of liberalism, religion, etc. and insights into the texts that you don't generally get from secular skimmings of them.

For example, notice him pointing out that the last of the Plagues, the death of the First Born, in the context of Egyptian political structure, meant the cutting off of the next generation of their ruling class. I've known that story since I was five and that way of thinking about it never occurred to me.  I think, considering what our Pharaohs, Putin, Trump, May,... are prepared to do to the entire world to maintain their wealth and power, the idea that you would need something that dramatic to soften the hardened heart of a Pharaoh isn't poetic exaggeration, it is extreme realism.  Perhaps it was also necessary to convince those held in bondage that they had to take the chance of freedom, perhaps they needed to see something of that shocking magnitude before they could accept The Law which counters the eternally encountered Pharaonic status quo.  Maybe it will take something like that for us, too.  We're not so very different, America has set up a golden moon-calf as a focus of worship.

As presented by a scholar and reader as deep and as profound as Walter Brueggemann, texts you read in a modern, literalist manner, what I'd also point out is a superficial manner, take on a depth that few other products of human thought ever achieved.

I hope the publication of that section is by permission.  I haven't read the whole book yet, it's on order, if I live that long.  Don't worry, I'm expected to.  Or worry, depending on who's reading this.  I knew I could get atheists to pray.

No comments:

Post a Comment